Islamolepsy: The New Pathology

In a recent YouTube video, a de facto symposium of world-class scholars and political authors, including Paul Williams, Melanie Phillips, Bernard Lewis, and Mark Steyn, have united to articulate a grim and pressing warning to a seemingly insensible Western world. As Steyn tells it, the world’s most advanced societies are starting to go out of business, on the one hand refusing to assess and confront the gathering Islamic storm that threatens their survival and, on the other, losing out in the reproductive sweepstakes. Europe in particular is poised to suffer a Damoclean fate. Tracing an inverted family tree in which four grandparents and two parents produce one child, the continent is losing the battle of generational replenishment. It is only a matter of time before Europe as we know it closes shop and a burgeoning Islamic ummah accomplishes its version of a corporate takeover.

Meanwhile, it would be a mistake to conclude that a vibrant and rejuvenated Islam is patiently waiting for the inevitable historical denouement to occur. On the contrary, even as it prepares to celebrate its demographic triumph, it is robustly — and successfully — pursuing its evident intention to assert itself as a destabilizing factor in European society. And its most powerful ally in its campaign of eventual conquest is the European postmodern elite itself, for whom one truth is as good as another and no culture is worse than any other — with the exception, naturally, of the Judeo-Christian armature of norms and values now regarded as both decadent and expendable. Europe’s political class, public intellectuals, journalists, activist judges, talking heads, and, oddly enough, parts of the clergy have banded together as a fifth column to usher in a new dispensation, which Bat Ye’or and others have aptly dubbed Eurabia.

How could so unprecedented a collapse of will and principle have taken place? How is it possible that, in the words of Bernard Lewis from the video discussion, Muslims “now consider Europe the House of Islam”? And that the European intelligentsia have given them the key to the front door?

The continent is suffering from what we might call Islamolepsy, the kind of rigidity found in schizophrenia and hypnotic trances, now transposed upon a collective cultural sensibility and reducing it to a condition of social and political helplessness. It does not know how to fight back; indeed, apart from a few pitiful twitches like banning articles of clothing, it is increasingly incapable of doing so. Sharialaw is gradually being introduced in Britain, with the approval of Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury — a harbinger of things to come in other EU countries. Counter episodes are unconvincing. Much has been made, for example, of Switzerland’s curtailing of minarets, but the new mega-mosque in Cologne, Germany, will boast two 18-storey high minarets, and in Belgium Christian churches are being turned into mosques, a scene straight out of French novelist Jean Raspail’s premonitory The Camp of the Saints. There are currently 6,000 mosques in Europe and the number is growing.

Far more worrisome, America as well may be gradually succumbing to the same pandemic. Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan and The World Turned Upside Down, laments that Europe now malingers in a state of denial, “and to a certain extent, America too.” But it is far more than a certain extent, as the current Park51 mosque controversy makes amply clear. Whether or not the mosque should be built two blocks from Ground Zero has triggered a vehement debate among the American public, but it is the minor question. The major concern is whether or not Islam should be permitted to infiltrate the living plasm of American society — an issue for which the Ground Zero mosque is merely representative, functioning as a symbol and an attention-concentrator.

What is most astonishing is that the question even needs to be raised in the first place, since the slightest acquaintance with the historical brunt of Islam, its desire to establish a world-dominant caliphate, its 1400-year record of conquest, spoliation and oppression, its doctrinal ordnance which enjoins the suppression or murder of the infidel in surah after surah of the Koran and the ancillary literature, its practice of taqiyyah (or obligatory lying as a form of defense under duress, as in Koran 16: 106, which has been interpreted to mean deception in order to promote its underlying agenda), and its campaign to impose sharia law upon the social and juridical framework of a free society — all this should have alerted us immediately to the menace. That is, assuming we were awake and sentient.